Google Living Stories lets you read the same reporting and analysis that you expect from The New York Times and The Washington Post, delivered on a highly interactive platform. Google is providing the technology platform, the journalists from the Times and Post are writing and editing the stories.

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. Check out the YouTube video below that provides a 2 minute, 35 second overview.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, “Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories,” Neha Singh, a software engineer, and Josh Cohen, a senior business product manager, wrote, “There’s been no shortage of talk recently about the ‘future of news.’ Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we’re deeply interested in, and we’ve been exploring potential solutions.”

But consider the different strategies being used — as well as the different tactics.

Murdoch is talking to Microsoft and using his bully pulpit as a business celebrity to blame Google for stealing snippets of “his” news stories. Google, on the other hand, is working with The New York Times and Washington Post continuing to innovate.

James Barksdale, former CEO, Netscape, once said, “The outcome of the battle between the alligator and the bear depends upon the terrain.”

Well, the terrain in news search is shifting. And Living Stories is Google’s way of telling Murdoch to “buzz off.”

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.